Hope: from Old English hopa: definition - verb, to express a desire for something; noun, the feeling of desiring something that's not entirely beyond your reach. So ... I hope to see you tomorrow (verb) vs. It is my hope that none of us will be pinged before our holiday (noun).
Hope is an essential part of our lives. Without hope, what are we? Who are we? And where are we going?If hope were completely withdrawn from our lives, most of us would be utterly lost. I know I would be. Hope, after all, is the thing ... the essence, if you like ... that drives us. It is the catalyst of ambition and the enabler of dreams.
Pliny the Elder said, "Hope is the pillar that holds up the world."
I like that image ... a solid pillar holding up the world ... for us. It is somehow reassuring. But Pliny didn't say solid. The hopeful part of me added that, making it a hopefully solid pillar.
What if the pillar were to get a bit blurred? What if it bowed perhaps and buckled? Is the pillar, as Pliny imagined it, always as strong as we would like it to be? Hmmm ... on the one hand, we have Fyodor Dostoevsky who said, "To live without hope is to cease to live." Which was true for Pliny - quite literally - he hoped to be a hero but his pillar collapsed along with those of Pompeii, when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. On the other hand, and rather less depressingly, there is Harvey Milk who said, "Hope will never be silent." I'm in Milk's camp. In my world, hope is a pillar bedecked with bells. Never silent. Which camp are you in?
Even during this life in a time of covid, hope has not been and is not silent. I know ... I know ... it does, at times perhaps, feel like we are losing our collective grip on hope. But there is the hope that covid might not get us. The hope that somehow we and our loved ones will be spared the misery of long-covid. The hope that it will soon be over and the hope that we will never have to teach algebra to our children again. The hope that we won't run out of loo roll. The hope that we might get away on holiday. The hope ... fill in your own ...
So, there are myriad hopes even during life in a time of covid. But ... pause for a moment to see those statements for what they are. They are honest ... yes. But they identify an us and an our and pretty much discard ideas of other and of them. Yet, hasn't much of our pandemic behaviour been about other and them? It has. Because we wear masks to protect others. Not ourselves (... not to a very great extent anyway). And they wear masks to protect us. This disconnect between what we can and cannot control illustrates just how utterly disingenuous it is to suggest that we 'exercise personal responsibility and/or choice.' My personal choice is for us and them to wear masks. But if others choose to see freedom day as the end of social distancing and of mask-wearing, then the us who choose to continue to wear a mask are taking a pretty pointless path. Yes, we the mask wearers, will continue to protect others but if others refuse to wear masks and they are infectious, they'll give it to us anyway. What does that say about the value of my personal choice not to catch the virus?
So what do we do?
We hope. Don't we? We hope that the government has got it right. We hope that releasing our nation does not create a supersized petri dish for the generation of new variants. We hope that we enter autumn with all of our children safely back at school. We hope that the NHS will not be overwhelmed and will be able to catch up on the pandemic backlog. We hope that Christmas this year will be normal. We hope that our politicians are big enough to act like Israel if there is a tsunami of daily cases and will take it on the chin if their decisions have to be reversed. We hope that the BMA and the UK scientists who oppose total freedom are being overcautious. We hope that we can avoid future lockdowns ... we hope ...
Yes ...
... We. Hope.
I write we when of course I mean I. I plus the you who I hope ... there I go again ... agree with me. I know that many don't. I know that the country is suffering economically. And I know that writing we is horribly ignorant and selfish when what I should be worrying about is the bigger picture. So not what happens here, where we have 80% of adults first-vaccinated. But instead I ... we! ... should be looking at the rest of the world and including it in our hopes. Of course we should! Especially when today's headlines suggest a truly appalling excess death toll of 4 million in India due to covid (vs. the 'official toll' of 400,000). Poor access to vaccines and deepening poverty join to make a rust that corrodes hope's pillar.
But ...
... hmm - I'm not sure if I dare pile more worries into this rant-y blog, but I'm afraid I'm missing something ... something so huge it's like an enormous stampeding elephant-in-the-room. Where the room is the size of our planet and the elephant is climate change. Gaius Plinius Secundus perhaps wasn't the best example of hoping for better things. But maybe his is a stark reminder that hope - his to save the people of Pompeii and ours to save the planet - sometimes isn't enough. We need to see our hopes for the fragile desires they are and act upon them. All of us. Life in a time of covid-19 is a lesson. We need to use some of the lessons learnt to work together to fend off 'Life in a time of climate disaster.' Only then will we have any hope of avoiding following Pliny into a fatal conflagration.
... do I apologise for writing a procrasti-rant?
No. But ... I hope ... I really do hope that most of you will continue to wear a mask.
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